The Mommy Blog | Adventures from the Wonderbelly of Motherhood

Friday, January 23, 2004

Logan and I had our own Friday Five last night while reading bedtime stories. Last night’s story was Everybody Cooks Rice, whose message is that “We are all one family, especially when it comes to the way we like to eat.”

It turned out to be an apt choice, because Logan had been learning about diversity in kindergarten, and the teacher had come up with some great ways of putting things.

Logan: “Mom, look at my necklace.” [Shows off circle of paper with picture of dove with olive branch colored on it and tied to a loop of yarn] ” We talked about… what’s that man’s name?”

Me: [Resisting urge to say “Rose?”] “I need a little more to go on…”

Logan: “He was very important.”

Me: [Riffing off the whole dove-branchy thing] “Noah? Jesus?”

Logan: “No. Ma… Marlin…”

Me: “Martin Luther King, Jr.?”

Logan: [beaming] “Yes! He said that we should all love each other. Even if we look different, we should all love each other anyway, because it’s how you look on the inside that counts! See? Just because Daphne is red, and you’re brown [hey! dark blonde…], and I’m white, we should all still love each other!”

OK, it’s an overly small subset, but he gets the general idea. Later, after we read about all the different ways rice can be prepared in different cultures, he asked me a whole series of questions.

1. “Mom, I think you’re going to know the answer to this, because you lived there when you were a girl… is Chicago in the East, the West, the South, or the North?” (Answer: the middle west. Threw him for a loop on that one.)

2. “What kind of rice did you eat in Chicago?” (Answer: all kinds. Tried to explain concept of deep, inner-city pockets of ethnicity, but left off when he glazed over.)

3. “What kind of rice do we eat here?” (Answer: whatever can be stuffed into the rice cooker and left alone until ready.)

4. “Mommy, Daddy told me about the parts of the country because I was frustrated that I couldn’t read the maps in my wild animal books. Can you show me on my globe where the Bitter Artic Cold is?” (Answer: Right there at the top. Rebuttal: “No, there’s no snow where you’re pointing. There’s lots of Bitter Artic Snow there, and this patch is green.” (Side note: many of these phrases are lifted straight out of Richard Attenborogh’s Life of Mammals series, and are more often than not delivered in an English accent—it cracks us right up.)

5. “Mom, did you know that when you talk about the Artic, you have to say ‘Bitter?’ It’s because it’s Bitter Cold there.